 Well, and welcome back to Stand the Energy Man. This week's show is streaming live from the spacious Think Tech studios here on the Fort Street Mall in beautiful downtown Honolulu, Hawaii. Can you believe that it's March of 2018 already? I might as well start shopping for all my holiday gifts because it's going to be here before you know it. I just feel it coming. I'd like to start off today's show by sending a big mahalo out to the folks that put together yesterday's Renew Rebuild Hawaii Forum at the HIKO training room downtown. They had great speakers, great questions and answers, exceptional information for everyone. I'd like to give a big mahalo to HIKO Hawaii Energy, Michael Markrich from Granite Power for the great event and the cordial hospitality they provided. In honor of that great forum yesterday, I'd like to start off today's show with the video I plan to show often because I think it helps folks understand how my career can help us build a more secure, resilient power grid not only here in Hawaii, but around the world. So if we can, let's roll that tape. There are over 300 million people in our country and the vast majority rely on large scale centralized power grids for their energy. What the infrastructure is aging and it is vulnerable, natural disasters, cyber attacks and other threats can leave large swathes of the country without power. Fortunately, there is an alternative. A renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future. Renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar, wind, hydrogen, waste to energy and geothermal. That power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries, hydrogen, flywheels, pumped hydro and others. These microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission, especially to critical facilities like hospitals, airports and military bases. Unlike our current large scale systems, microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters, threats and power outages. Our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money. Grid outages cost up to $33 billion annually. They are expensive to build, expand and maintain and they're inefficient, losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss, spending reserves and theft. Microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency. They also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs, keeping money within our local economy and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean renewable energy. Our energy grid was built over 100 years ago when energy needs were simple with the increased complexities of energy demands, power sources and transportation. Now our old grids struggle to keep up. We require new ways to generate, store and deliver energy. Renewable energy microgrids are a potential long term solution that will provide safe, clean, reliable and efficient energy for generations to come. So microgrids and dispatchable power are not the complete answer of course, but they are a part of an all of the above solution in improving our electric grid for the future. And we had a great discussion on that yesterday. Last week I got my monthly newsletter from Keith Malone and also from Maury Markowitz and Keith Malone's from the California Fuel Cell Partnership. And I'd like to share some of the stories on hydrogen highlights from around the world because I think most people don't stay in touch with the pulse of what's going on in hydrogen like I do. And this is a really good way to just kind of give you a snapshot in, you know, 15, 20 minutes that talks about everything going on around the world in hydrogen and renewable energy. For starters, a company called Newe Galway has officially launched a project called Sea Fuel, which aims to use hydrogen as a renewable resource across the Atlantic area to power local transport fleets of cars and also support a shift towards low carbon economy in the area. The project will be piloted on the Canary Islands, Madeira in Portugal, and on the Aran Islands. Led by Newe Galway, this 3.5 million euro three-year project will use the expertise and infrastructure of a group of transnational partners in renewable energy to demonstrate the viability of hydrogen as a fuel to be used by the local economy in the transport sectors. It primarily will do fleet vehicles and things for those islands and we'll be interested to watch that pilot go on. Japanese giant Kawasaki aims to use Latrobe Valley Brown Coal to produce hydrogen in a project that aims to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions and promises huge economic benefits for the region. There's a potential for significant economic growth and job creation in the Latrobe Valley with new hydrogen-related industries, a senior Kawasaki executive told the conference at the Federation University last week. Australia has a big potential to be a leading hydrogen society in the world given their abundant resources, such as brown coal. The international auto manufacturers are debating the future of personally owned vehicles and Hyundai Motor Corporation, a latecomer to the electrification and autonomous driving scene but no stranger to hydrogen by the way, is betting against the individuals owning robot cars and such and is looking at a future, preparing for a future in which the biggest buyers will be ride-sharing giants such as Uber, Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and an organization called Grab Taxi Holdings, which I'm not familiar with but apparently is good somewhere in Asia. The South Korean automaker said last month and invested in a Singapore-based Grab Southeast Asia's biggest cab hailing service as part of their commitment to this effort. The chief of Japanese, Franco-Japanese Nissan, Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Motors Alliance said in November that the traditional mode is here to stay and alternative forms of mobility would only make a marginal impact, while Uber chief product officer Jeff Holden has termed individual car ownership as a very inefficient and will probably go away. Subaru's Corp. Tom Dahl said that most people will continue to own or lease their vehicles in much the same way they do today. For real people swapping out a car, getting their stuff out and the pens, the dog hair and everything just doesn't seem to make much sense. It's a real pain, Dahl, the president of Subaru America said at the Chicago Auto Show. Most people still want to have their long-term relationship with just one or two cars in the driveway. It's easier and simpler that way. With the Brazilian internal combustion engines on the world's stage today, some folks think that we need to use them, but make them run cleaner. And for those of you that aren't familiar with internal combustion engines, diesel engines for example that are now being required in the US to be tier four, which is much more efficient and clean. All the cleanup is done after the engine does its work. In other words, it's all add on to the engine to make it cleaner and cleaner. It's scrubbing the emissions and that can only go so far. So some companies are looking to new technology that actually changes the way those engines work so that we can start cleaning the environment but keep the same platform or the same internal combustion engine but change some of the components or modify them. To that end, a company called Hi-Tech Power based in Redmond, Washington intends to introduce three products over the next year or two. The first we use hydrogen to clean up existing diesel engines, increasing their fuel efficiency by a third and eliminating over half of their air pollution with an average nine-month payback on the investment. The company says that it's potentially an enormous market with plenty of existing demand which Hi-Tech hopes to capitalize off and spring load its second product, a retrofit that will transform any internal combustion engine vehicle to a zero-mission vehicle, also known as a Zev vehicle, by enabling it to run on pure hydrogen. That will primarily be targeted at large fleets. And that will tee up their third product that they hope to come out with down the road which is one of Johnson and he sat his eyes on from the beginning of his company and that would revolutionize the decentralized energy system. A stationary energy storage product meant to complete, compete with, eventually out-compete big batteries. This next article brought a tear to mind not because it's sad but because it's about our work here in Hawaii at HCAT. The Air Force is demonstrating hydrogen as an alternative fuel source to article states and it was put out by the Air Force Civil Engineering Center and picked up by quite a few of the press services around the world so we actually got some international coverage on this. The article says that the hydrogen project has been in place for over a decade, originally installed in 2006 as a mobile hydrogen production and compression storage and dispensing unit. It was upgraded in 2010 and both systems were set up to support Department of Defense hydrogen vehicle testing here in Honolulu. It includes both hydrogen internal combustion tests and fuel cell vehicles that were demonstrated by the Army, the Air Force and the Navy here in Hawaii. Some of the hydrogen vehicles currently supported by the station include a 25 passenger crew bus and in the published article there's a photo of that bus. There's an MJ-1E electric weapons loader that we use targeted for our F-22 fighters at Hickam Air Force Base and also a U-30 heavy aircraft tug which is built at all aircraft that exceed a gross weight of 300,000 pounds like 747, C-17s and C-5s. We do all that work for the Air Force here out of HCAT and it's one of the things that makes me feel good when we make the international news waves. In more collaboration between Japan and the folks down under in Queensland University, the University of Technology, they built a prize relationship with the University of Tokyo's research center for advanced science and technology called R-Cast and one of its leading energy researchers has signed an agreement, what's his name now, Matsu Masazaku, excuse me, Sugiyama, he quit last week and signed an agreement with the Japanese University to carry out a joint research and academic project for R-Cast. They're a leader in the conversion of solar energy to next generation fuels using photovoltaics and compound semiconductors and Professor Sugiyama has achieved world leading results using solar energy to produce hydrogen from water through electrolysis and that's been a kind of one of those things that a lot of folks have been trying to do, go right from photovoltaics to more like a photosynthesis where you just apply water and sunlight and just hydrogen comes off of it without actually doing electrolysis and sounds like that's what they're teamed up for here. Integration of these technologies into Queensland, which has a strong capacity to implement solar driven technologies, could lead to higher levels of efficiency and establishment of new export industries for the state, said Queensland University of Technology's Ian McKinnon from the University's Institute for Future Environments, which will pay an integral part in that partnership. In a related story from Australia, Kali Sinfuels, coal based hydrogen ambitions extend to Queensland. That's the title of the article, it says the plants budgeted about $735 million US would use coal to produce about 5,000 barrels a day of synthetic clean diesel with the aim of later adding hydrogen to produce to the production once the market for fuel cell vehicles develops. They would also supply up to 50 megawatts of base load power to the grid. CCS power projects have struggled to make material progress in Australia with several falling by the wayside, beaten by the challenge of high cost. Chevron's $2 billion plus Gorin Carbon capture project, which will extract carbon from gas and bury it underground, has been delayed by technical hitches and is now expected to start up in December quarter of this, the last quarter of this year at the earliest. Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries is however hoping that the move forward this year and La Trove Valley, the article I talked about before, is aiming to convert brown coal into hydrogen for export. Toyota already has cheaper EV motors by having rare earth metals in it. This subject actually came up yesterday when we were at the Renew Rebuild Hawaii. People were asking me about how we're getting closer to a good cost price point for hydrogen and so they were pointing to how expensive fuel cells were five or ten years ago and I told them that Toyota has reduced the cost of making their fuel cells by almost 95% over the last decade or so by some very diligent work in their labs and getting the exposed areas of their plates that do the conversions so thin they're down to close to one out of thickness which is the goal and they can last years and years even at one out of thickness. So Toyota has developed a magnet for the motors that as much as halves the use of the rare earth metals on neodymium and eliminates the use of another one called terbium and dysprosium on malchemist. The company has said that at a briefing in Tokyo on Tuesday and it's in their place Toyota will use the rare earth metal lanthium and cerium which costs 20 times less than neodymium. The automaker plans to use supplies used to manufacture magnets. Ballard a big fuel cell company has follow on orders for next generation development of non-precious metal catalyst based fuels and I'm going to come back to that story after we take a quick break but Ballard's a big company in Canada that we've been working with and several of the major industries work with for their fuel cells. So we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back in 60 seconds. Good afternoon my name is Howard Wig. I am the proud host of Code Green a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists both from here and the mainland on energy efficiency which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Aloha I'm Keeley Ikeena and I'm here every other week on Mondays at two o'clock PM on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together working together for a better economy, government and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at two PM on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha Hey welcome back to my lunch hour streaming live from actually Kuala Lumpur Valley on Kauai on a pretty nice afternoon. Used to love doing look at that next to the 150th radar site there defense radar site on Kauai beautiful view of Kuala Lumpur Valley. A press release from Ballard that I talked about before the break dated September 12th says that the technology solutions work that they've been they've been working on resulted the incorporation of initiable non-precious metal catalyst they got acronym for NPMC into the world's first NPMC based proton exchange membrane which is by far the most popular membrane used for electrolysis and fuel cells nowadays and their fuel cell product at the 30 watt fuel cell generation gen system their fuel cell stack which was made available for commercial sale in late 2017. The subsequent technology solutions program was announced in Ballard's September 18, 2017 press release to assess the potential for development of that NPMC based fuel cell stacks for commercial material handling applications for those of you that don't know there's over 20,000 forklifts and material handling apparatus being used just in the U.S. alone and it's one of the ways we're looking at putting a lot of fuel cell infrastructure across the U.S. to support the transportation network it'll also support these fuel cells and big warehouses. The blue chip brands such as Walmart and Amazon have already demonstrated a strong value proposition offered by the current fuel cell powered forklift trucks operating in high throughput distribution centers ones around 24-7. With successful completion and the assessment the next stage was announced today will focus certain performance and power density enhancement to support the development of low-cost NPMC technology and fuel cell stacks. In Dubai they're trying to establish the Gulf's first solar-driven hydrogen facility so hydrogen from the facility will be used to power cars at the Expo 2020 site. Dubai Electricity and Water, also known as DIWA, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the German multinational Siemens to pilot the Gulf's first solar-driven hydrogen electrolysis facility. The agreement confirmed on Monday will see the facility established at Davos Outdoor Testing Center in Mohammed bin Rashin al-Maktoum solar park in Dubai. Both sides will seek to test and showcase an integrated megawatt scale plant to produce hydrogen using renewable energy from solar photovoltaic panels with the ability to store gas and then use it for a re-electrification of the transportation sector or other industries. And really that's what we're trying to push over here on this platform in this show is to really look at hydrogen not just as a solution for transportation, but also as an integrated piece of a renewable energy microgrid or full-blown grid. The DIWA and Expo 2020 Dubai intend to use the hydrogen to power fuel cell vehicles. Key facilities on the project will be open to visitors at the World Expo and live data will be displayed. Island communities can get their wind power in gas form. This is from Norway. They're not just racking up Olympic medals, these folks have a project called Remote which will fund four European projects that demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of two fuel cell-based hydrogen energy storage solutions that will capture renewable energy in isolated microgrids or off-grid remote areas. The power supply to be tested has two features that are unknown to most people. Two farms at BNCET include a plan to get their electricity via micro network, a hyper-local power grid that connects the two farms directly to the wind turbines. This network will be disconnected from the mainstream power grid. In addition, the leftover wind power will be transformed into hydrogen gas. This energy-rich connection also uses a green battery that can save energy much longer than traditional batteries. And note that this project was funded by the fuel cells in hydrogen joint undertaking over in Europe. Hydrogen, the fabulous fuel, there's a story here that says that's why experts are increasingly turning to energy storage systems as the key ingredient to ensure stable supply of electricity generated from renewable power sources. Various analysis including the, I won't even try this, it's called energy storage in German. Study conducted by the UMSICTHT at Fraunhofer Institute predicts that Germany will require as much as 50 gigawatts of energy storage capacity by 2030. In the future, the technologies will have, in the future, the technologies we have today such as batteries, capacitors and flywheels, compressed air storage will not be sufficient, explains Gabrielle Schmidl, who heads the hydrogen solutions at Siemens Corporation Technology. We'll need solutions with a storage capacity that has not yet been achieved, namely in the realm of terawatt hours. And she looks at hydrogen as the ideally suited for this purpose. NIL Hydrogen, another big European hydrogen company, released its fourth quarter financial results. And NIL reported revenues in the fourth quarter of 111.9 million, and this is in Norwegian Kroners I believe, up from 50.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2016. The company entered into an exclusive partnership with Nikola Motors Company. For those that just need a reminder, we interviewed the president of Nikola here on the show probably about three or four months ago. He's putting together a 18-wheeler tractor trailer rig that will go into a lease mode. They'll be manufacturing the tractor trailers, leasing them out and providing the hydrogen to the folks leasing the vehicles at a really reasonable rate. And they feel that they can make a good profit for truckers moving freight across the US with all hydrogen, all clean fleet. The Nikola Motors Company during the quarter is evaluated as possibly 10 times the capacity expansion to accommodate mega-scale orders and to maintain a leading cost position. We're evaluating a capacity expansion that will reduce our cost by more than 30% by developing a fully automated, large-scale production at Nautenden. Driving down the cost will not only allow us to maintain a leading cost position, but also enable us to offer renewable hydrogen products that are fully competitive with fossil fuel alternatives, says Jean-André Locke. He adds that the initial capacity and increase in decarbonizing from 25 megawatts to 40 megawatts is about to be completed at minimal cost. Frazier, another big company, introduces an individual assemblyman, introduces a bill to put more clean energy trucks on the road. This is out of California. Assemblymember Jim Frazier, out of Discovery Bay, California, and chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee, has introduced legislation to level a playing field for zero-mission and near-zero-mission trucks by ensuring that they can have the same carrying capacity as diesel and gasoline-powered trucks. AB 2061, the Clean Truck Deployment Act, would remove weight limit barriers that currently constrain the use of zero-mission and near-zero-mission trucks in California. I would assume that's mostly batteries because they're really heavy. So AB 2061 is supported by the California Natural Gas Coalition, CalSTAR, San Diego Disposal Association, Clean Energy, and Tesla. There's no known opposition. So based on those, it looks like it's mostly batteries and somewhat clean natural gas. Heavy-duty trucks are creating the most pollution on our roads and on our neighborhoods. And if we're going to incentivize the public and private fleets to transfer the cleaner alternative trucks, we have to remove all the hurdles, said Tom Lawson, president of the California Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition. This bill seeks to do this, that, and we look forward to working with Assemblymember Frazier on helping California join 22 other states that have already enacted similar legislation. ITM Power, another big European hydrogen company that's building stations in California, said hydrogen systems see hydrogen market at a tipping point. The market for hydrogen energy systems as at a tipping point, ITM Power CEO Dr. Graham Cooley told S&P Global Plats February 8th. The value of global tenders seeking hydrogen energy equipment now exceeds over 200 British pounds, reflecting consistent growth in industrial demand, Cooley said. These qualified projects ready to go with finance in place, there's a bigger underlying pipeline for the projects and all our commercial sales, all our commercial sales, none of these are grants. The market falls into three categories, clean fuel, power to gas, and renewable chemistry. The Sheffield based manufacturer of PEM electrolysis equipment says straight sales are now displacing grant funded projects, that's a big deal in case you're not catching that. You know, a lot of people depend on government money to keep these businesses, these new clean energy companies going. This is saying that the industry is turning a corner where their actual sales are driving the need for grants to near zero, so they can start using private industry investments and not just funding from the government. It's about to move the new premises in Rotterdam to a new location with a capacity to build 300 megawatts of year of electrolysis. Two things are happening, we're being selected because we have the equipment field and are seen as a market leader, but also market growth industrial companies are looking to buy power to gas and refueling equipment and I'm really encouraged, he said. You know, there's a lot more hydrogen news going on, but believe it or not we've blown through an entire half hour, so I'll save some of these for a later show and we'll get back with you and talk about some more. On the ending note, I'd like to brag a little bit, my team at HCAT won the Department of Business Economic Development Tourism's Team of the Year award for 2017 and just want to congratulate the folks at HCAT for all the stuff that they do for the state of Hawaii, which is a lot. So thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the studio for putting up with my buffoonery and my technological incompetence and helping me get through today's show and thanks for all of you for joining us. We'll see you next week, Friday on Stand the Energy Man, aloha.